Forum 11 Review

At Forum 11, we explored The Smart Digital Hospital: Making the Invisible Patient Visible. This day was filled with discussions and debates around how this can be achieved and the importance of integrating digital systems in helping to achieve this.

This event was hosted by Ascom, who are a global healthcare provider of onsite communications and collaboration solutions. They provide end to end monitoring and support to clients. One of the key points that was raised, was the importance of choosing the right nurse to call solutions. This is one of the areas that has the most focus within the Healthcare Industry amongst hospitals and healthcare trusts’.

When investigating Digital solutions, it is vital to consider how these will allow for seamless integration, effective orchestration and efficient enabling into the current workflow, whether this is to replace old systems or to add into the already existing ones. With the rise in digital focus, brought on by the Covid19 pandemic, it has never been more important than it is now, for Healthcare Professionals to be able to easily manoeuvre through the adoption phase of this new digital era. It was great to hear from attendees such as Mace Group, James Paget NHS Trust, HLM Architects, Tilbury Douglass and other attendees on how they are driving change within their respective fields, projects, and companies.

Ascom provided an in-depth demonstration of how smart devices could be tailored to assist Healthcare Professionals in their day-to-day work lives. It was highlighted how these could help to manage the delegation and coordination of daily workloads, allocation of relevant activities and tasks to the appropriate staff member/department, distribution of alert notifications in a timely fashion to multiple groups, provide a secure universal digital platform for all communications and patient data, therefore not only making the invisible patient visible, but also making all the activities and everything related to the patient’s care, also visible so that this can be streamlined across the board.

Many patients within single occupancy rooms especially, have stated that they feel disconnected from the world, when in healthcare settings, so it is even more critical than ever, for hospitals and trusts to ensure that they are at the forefront of developing more innovative ways to stay better connected with their patients as well as their colleagues and it has been proven that digital is the solution for this.

As much as digital can be seen as the next step up the ladder, it was also identified that there are drawbacks to this if this is not integrated properly within the working environment. Without the necessary training provided to essential staff members, digital systems can come across overwhelming to employees, meaning that they are either not used to the best of their potential or are not adopted altogether leading to some Healthcare organisations being ‘left behind’.

Overall, it was agreed that digital solutions, when planned properly and organised well, can be tailored to assist healthcare facilities with providing the best care to patients, through equipping staff with the necessary tools and training behind how to best utilize the available resources.

We look forward to our next forum where we will be exploring digital strategies and the implications of these on the design and build processes.